community

Keeping Company. Neighbors.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

A friend mentions her mother has an art opening that evening in the sprawling building that was once the village inn. We’ve just returned from a walk and stand in a field where, 25 years ago, she sold homemade pies and I sold maple syrup. We each held a nursing baby, in those years.

Her mother lives beside me, so about eight o’clock, the time I’m usually brushing teeth or walking around the house putting water glasses and cat bowls in the kitchen sink, I pull on a sweater (hello, Vermont July) and walk downtown. Monday, hardly anyone is out this evening, as the sunset does its peach-and-rose watercolor magic along the mountains.

I’m amazed, again, at my neighbor’s talent, her unique vision a mixture of O’Keeffe and Cézanne. I stand holding her hand and talking, this woman who lived plenty of lives before I met her. When I weed my front yard garden, she’ll sometimes lean out of her door and holler, “Hello, neighbor!” her hair in plastic curlers.

I walk the long way home through neighborhoods where the children have been called in for the night. Stray teenagers are out; no one else. There’s no glimmer of moon, but the stars are winking into their nightly places. I take an extra loop, and the darkness folds around me.

I’m in this odd place where people I hardly know touch my shoulders, rub my growing-back hair, as if to confirm that, yes, I’m alive. Or I’m looked at silently, uncertainly. The cancer’s made me rougher and gentler. Disinterested in cattiness, willing to visit a neighbor when my body aches to lie down.

At home, I linger on the house steps, the tree frogs serenading. These summer days are long, long, with some hours of work. More than anything, I’m determined to finish a draft of this third novel, determined to sell this book, too. Stubborn my mother would tell me. You’re so stubborn. By now it’s dark, the scattered village lights cupped in the town’s narrow valley, the Milky Way a silent celestial river. My mother despised my stubbornness, this trait that mirrored her. Or maybe I’m completely wrong about that.

I water the hanging plants, and yet I’m not willing to go in for the night, lie down and read, sleep. Last November, I was sitting on these steps in the darkness, the news of having cancer fresh and raw. A different neighbor appeared and sat with me. We talked about opioids and THC. She told me about her husband’s death. In the chilly November, we sat in our coats, a quiet between us, she keeping me company.

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, 
and invisible guests come in and out at will.”
― Czesław Miłosz

Survivors.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 13 Comments

Friends appear at my kitchen door with a rose and gossip. Midwinter, and I’m happy to keep my cats sprawled belly up before the glowing wood stove. The creatures sleep on the hot metal floor guard, their fur gathering ashes and birch bark curls. The snow bends down my thorny rose bushes. My daughter texts with news of a robin sighting. We talk about the usual — town meeting day approaching, the strangeness of an administration determined to chop apart the country. In Vermont, we do our usual thing: heads together, we strategize how to endure, how to keep our hearts open.

The snow is no fresh news. The unbroken cold (and hardly that awful — I’ve seen 40 below, albeit just once and that was enough 40 below for this lifetime) is no news, either. The sun begins to return, the days spreading out at either end, although the icicles remain icy, dripless daggers.

For me, this winter is the most profound of my life, surely the most sacred. I’ve had my own lovely share of winters with my newborns nestled against my chest, of small children delighted with swirling snowflakes, of long skis through woods. On the night before the Presidential election, an ER doctor gently told me I had cancer. Months later, I’ve immersed myself in the mundaneness of insurance and how to navigate the multi-levered medical system. Beyond that, my life slowed, often to simply enduring an afternoon, a night….

I’m adding to my draft of this post, a day later, now hospitalized again. Let there be no mistaking one of the world’s realities: infection is a mighty (and frequently fatal) force. Now, my daughter and I have this down: fluids and pain meds, with the curve now of puzzling out with the oncologist why I’m back. I contracted Giardia last summer from swimming in unclean water. Although I’ve been treated, the question lingers… has this bizarrely lingered?

But I wanted to return to the beginning of this short piece, about the kindness of friends and strangers. Lymphoma is my disease to bear, my bone marrow and veins and intestines and organs. But now, I — who so long saw myself as a lone running wolf — have been humbled to realize I’ve never been apart from the world, all this time. All around me, strangers and loved ones alike hold me together.

From my friend Jo, who sends me an audio poem every night:

“Survivor”
Adele Kenny

A jay on the fence preaches to a
squirrel. I watch the squirrel quiver,
the way squirrels do – its whole
body flickers. I’m not sure why this
reminds me of when I was five and

something died in our drain spout.
Feather or fur, I watched my father
dig it out, knowing (as a child knows)
how much life matters. I have seen how
easily autumn shakes the yellow leaves,

how winter razes the shoals of heaven.
I have felt love’s thunder and moan, and
had my night on the wild river. I have
heard the cancer diagnosis with my name
in it. I know what mercy is and isn’t.

Morning breaks from sparrows’ wings
(life’s breezy business), and I’m still here,
still in love with the sorrows, the joys –
days like this, measured by memory, the
ticking crickets, the pulse in my wrist.

Small Soup Bowls. Quarantine. Icicles.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

My brother returns home, and I immediately slip up, ignore a morphine dose, am unable to eat. A lesson in my own laziness or foolishness learned: keep to the path.

For days, he sets small bowls of heated soup on my kitchen table – chicken and dumplings, our childhood favorite of pea soup, lentils with savory carrots. One night, my daughter bakes biscuits, opens a gift jar of raspberry jam (July!), and we revel at a nameless soup from a woman we’ve never met. Potatoes with the skins left on, chicken and maybe tarragon, celery, onion. There is nothing we could imagine adding.

Like these soup bowls, my physical life has narrowed to these warm rooms with cats, hours unfurling patiently as I stop counting days and treatments. Each day unfolds. On Saturday, I sit on the couch and return a friend’s call. Sunday, I return another call, listening to my laughter, their laughter, these friends who have been down their own stony journeys.

Quarantined, I’m connected to the world in ways I didn’t anticipate – emails and calls, books, prayers– a rosy swaddling aura. An acquaintance phones me with her cancer story and describes her year so straightforwardly she buoys me with courage. A friend offers to plow our driveway all winter; perpetually on the skimp, I’ve shoveled for years, but it’s a great gift to my people who are anyways busily feeding my wood stove and picking up morphine and antibiotics and driving me to bloodwork and The Good Doctor — not to mention, working their own jobs and walking their dogs and generally going about their lives.

So much kindness has come my way. The night the sainted nurse sat with me for an hour and a half while the final chemo infusion ebbed, ebbed, into my chest beside my heart, she counseled me to cultivate patience, that I will be able to give again, that the world spins and shifts.

In a wind gust, the robins’ nest falls from our porch beam. Icicles hang from the roof, radiant swords of sunlight.

…. A few lines from Louise Dickinson Rich, courtesy of my sister-in-law:

“All ordinary people like us, everywhere, are trying to find the same things. It makes no difference whether they are New Englanders or Texans or Malayans or Finns. They all want to be left alone to conduct their own private search for a personal peace, a reasonable security, a little love, a chance to attain happiness through achievement.”

Cancer, Election.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 9 Comments

In 2014, my sister was diagnosed with cancer (now healthily in remission), and I read The Emperor of All Maladies: a biography of cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. My marriage also fell apart that year, and I remember reading this fat library book in my car at school pickups, waiting for a job interview in Burlington, on benches waiting for court appearances. It’s a hefty book, with a lot of reading hours.

Three weeks into this flipped-upside-down world, my former life is already receding. I’ve been so surprised and grateful for the effusion of calls and emails, friends stopping by with food and gifts and simply to talk, to share news of their own world and listen to mine. I realize now how carelessly I had ebbed into a cynical place these last few months while the cancer was growing in me, weakening me.

Sure, it’s true that people sometimes give into the uglier strands of lying and cattiness and gossip, of insecurity and strange ways of playing people against each other — and sometimes engage in far worse things. In my Shire of Vermont, I see my decent state struggling with what’s playing out in national politics — and the looming threats. Which made me think, again, as I lay in bed listening to the rain this morning, how our individual lives reflect the greater society. Don’t waste your few days on junk and despair, those adolescent tricks. And thank you, all, for surrounding me with such light.

From Philip Larkin:

What are days for?

Days are where we live.   

They come, they wake us   

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:   

Where can we live but days?

The world, keep on keeping on….

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

The young barista in my coffee shop muses with me about the small pleasures of November: the summer slam of tourists quieted, the sudden simplicity of stillness. On a balmy afternoon, I head out in search of places where I’ve loved and been loved, the sunny afternoon so warm the crickets have struck up their chorus again.

A few days later, I’m in the diner, eating breakfast with a friend whose mind works along my hard-bitten lines. Our booth’s window looks down into the river where the patched-up cement walls have fallen flat. We are in absolute agreement that this shifting world of thoughts and opinions, all the junk fed by media and social media, come to naught. It’s action that shifts the world. And the world, despite our fears, will keep on keeping on.

I put poetry as action, too. Here’s a few lines from the incomparable Mary Ruefle’s “Glory.”

... I met a psychic who told me my position in the universe
but could not find the candy she hid from her grandkids.
The ordinary fear of losing one’s mind. You rinse the sink,
walk out into the October sunshine, and look for it
by beginning to think. That’s when I saw the autumn aster,
the sedum blooming in a purple field. The psychic said
I must see the word glory emblazoned on my chest. Secretly
I was hoping for a better word. I would have chosen for myself
an ordinary one like orchid or paw...

A Handshake and a Promise.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 6 Comments

I leave dinner with neighbors and friends and walk home, down through the village. It’s late enough that the few restaurants in town are closing down, a few lingerers at the bars while the waitstaff wipes down the tables, doubtlessly thinking of their own homes and nights ahead.

Knowing I would savor this walk, I brought my hat and a coat, and the night is warm enough. I’d been offered a ride — “it’s dark!” — but me who is afraid of so many things (rushing semis, rats) has no fear of this autumn dark, this small town. I pass no one, not even a dog walker.

End of October, and I labor through the daily chores, now shoveling ashes from the wood stove, putting away the summer’s chairs and garden tools. My daughter phones with a homework question. Over us, the ineffable holiness of the passing of both of my daughters’ grandmothers this year, the old women who had distanced themselves from their granddaughters. What will this mean for my young women? At dinner, whisperings about the election. Which way will this split?

Just beyond the village, a U-Haul idles, lights on. As I walk nearer, I squint in the brightness. U-Haul, those rental trucks that have appeared intermittently in my life. The last time was that sleety winter day when a couple loaded up barrels of syrup from our sugarhouse driveway. I was in a desperate time in my life then, selling what I could to pull up stakes with my daughters and light out for new territory. I took a chance on this couple, watching them head down the slushy road with our liquid gold with nothing more than a handshake and a promise between us.

As I walk by, the U-Haul driver doesn’t look up, reading his phone, maybe a map, maybe a love note. I keep walking. As for that couple, the handshake and promise were gold. A week later, the check arrived in the mail.